This cosmos, the identical for all,
no god nor man did create,
nevertheless it ever was and is and will likely be:
ever-living fireplace, kindling in measures
and being quenched in measures.
~ Heraclitus
The cosmos, as Carl Sagan put it, is all that’s or ever was or ever will likely be.
He was certainly impressed by Heraclitus. Two and a half millennia earlier he outlined the idea in very comparable phrases: “this cosmos,” he wrote, “ever was and is and will likely be”. It’s the first definition of the time period now we have, at the very least within the sense of that means all creation, previous and future.
It was not, nevertheless, the origin of the phrase. The Historical Greek κόσμος, or kosmos, meant order, as within the reverse of χάος, or chaos. And chaos, the poet Hesiod wrote centuries earlier, was the unique state of the universe. From it the world was created, and it stood thereafter in opposition: one thing, slightly than nothing; order, slightly than dysfunction.
That sense of order remains to be a guideline of cosmology. We belief that the cosmos is ordered, that the legal guidelines we derive right here on Earth apply equally within the Andromeda Galaxy and amid the warmth of the Massive Bang. That they’ll nonetheless apply ten billion years therefore, simply as they utilized on the day the Earth was born. Cosmos, for us, remains to be a perception so as over dysfunction.
Extra basically, we belief that there are legal guidelines to derive. The enterprise of cosmology, and most of recent science, rests on the concept that nature may be understood and that there’s some form of logical precept behind it. Heraclitus was not solely the primary to outline the cosmos, however he was additionally the primary to essentially elucidate this idea of a governing precept, which he known as logos.
After all, he additionally wrote down what he thought this precept was. To Heraclitus the cosmos was one thing continually in flux, during which issues had been continually remodeling to develop into their opposites. Scorching issues inevitably grew to become chilly, moist would develop into dry, and life would develop into dying.
Such fixed flux would possibly result in chaos, and thus to the top of the cosmos. But Heraclitus believed nature was ruled as an everlasting fireplace, continually kindled and quenched to maintain the whole lot in stability. Although the floor of the cosmos would possibly seem as raging flames, beneath all was stored in good order.
